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DVE2000
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Bug with NAT and port forwarding in Fusion 8.1

Just FYI in case anyone else is experiencing this issue. I upgraded to 8.1 earlier today, and my mail server running on a Win 8 VM stopped responding to IMAP and SMTP requests. Pretty much, the VM didn't have networking. I spent a lot of time on this, using vmnet-cli -c and --stop and --start and editing the nat.conf file and trying other things. I even removed and reinstalled Fusion 8.1. It finally came down to realizing that any time I tried to forward a port to the VM, networking broke for vmnet8. Luckily, I could get 8.02 (just the .app dir) back from a time machine backup and it's all working just fine again.

21 Replies
Mikero
Community Manager
Community Manager

Hm, that's interesting.

Did you reboot after upgrading? This was an area we worked on in 8.1

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Michael Roy - Product Marketing Engineer: VCF
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DVE2000
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

I did. Eventually, I even let OS X upgrade to 10.11.2, and the problem still wasn't fixed once the upgrade was done. I narrowed it down finally by playing with the net.conf.bak file and running a shell script that had the following lines (it's part of a script used on boot up to fix the vmnet8 after Fusion has started. Because sometimes Fusion resets the network configs, and I run a VM on boot up):

/Applications/VMware\ Fusion.app/Contents/Library/vmnet-cli --stop

cp /Library/Preferences/VMware\ Fusion/vmnet8/nat.conf.bak /Library/Preferences/VMware\ Fusion/vmnet8/nat.conf

/Applications/VMware\ Fusion.app/Contents/Library/vmnet-cli --start

I could comment out the port forwarding lines in the .bak file and save it, and rerun the script that did the above, and from the VM hit refresh in a browser and get to google.com. When I put the forwarding lines back, the network connection would die. And a browser refresh would time out. Couldn't even ping the host machine. I went back a forward a few times commenting out the lines and adding them back to verify that forwarding was the root cause.

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uhaas
Contributor
Contributor

I'm having an issue that resume from sleep networking is disabled until I quit Fusion and restart it.

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DVE2000
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

You could try use vmnet-cli to stop and restart networking. I'd just go back to 8.02 though.

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PeterKarlsson
Contributor
Contributor

I've got exactly the same problem which renders the entire use of VMware useless. I hope a quick fix is nearby.

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jcolestock
Contributor
Contributor

Same issue here.  Mac OS 10.11.2, Fusion 8.1, Windows 10 guest OS.

Tried removing/reinstalling the nic, removing and reinstalling vmware tools, looking for a new drivers, but no luck.

I go most everything is working in Bridged Mode, but would prefer to back in NAT mode.

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puckett_jw
Contributor
Contributor

I too am having this issue.  I so regret that I upgraded to 8.1.

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phinze
Contributor
Contributor

Hey all,

Paul from HashiCorp here, we're catching support tickets from Vagrant users on VMware Fusion 8.1.0 reporting port forwarding being broken.

Internally we have also reproduced this: every forwarded port comes back "Connection Refused" on the host.

Downgrading to 8.0.2 fixes the issue, so that's what we'll be recommending to our users for now. We'll track this thread to watch out for a fix.

taiidani
Contributor
Contributor

A similar thing happened to me for port 80 and port 443 using Vagrant. I confirmed that the vmnet8 configuration was updated...it just simply didn't let the ports go through. Connecting directly to the VMs IP address worked.

I ended up downgrading back to 8.0.2 which fixed my problem. Looking forward to 8.1.1 Smiley Wink

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rowers
Contributor
Contributor

I'm having the same issue with a Linux Mint guest.

How can a release make it out the door with such a fundamental thing having not been properly tested?

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oj0
Contributor
Contributor

Hi, has there been any update on this by the VMware or Vagrant team?

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taiidani
Contributor
Contributor

An update on this would be great. Since 8.1 came out I acquired a brand new Mac; Fusion 8.1's port forwarding was broken out of the box with a vanilla install. Downgrading to 8.0.2 fixed it.

My [and my employer] would greatly appreciate a fix or solution to this issue.

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fubvmware
VMware Employee
VMware Employee

Sorry for the inconvenience caused by this bug! We have a reproduce of the issue and are working on a fix. Before the fix is available, you might need to temporarily use Fusion 8.0.2 if you need port forwarding with NAT.

Thanks,

Bo

btipling
Contributor
Contributor

Any update on this? I just bought Vmware Fusion 8 pro and have no way to download anything but 8.1. I just spent a lot of money on this and vagrant and I can't get it to work because of this problem. Smiley Sad

Vagrant Up fails with VMware · Issue #6772 · mitchellh/vagrant · GitHub

Is there a link to download 8.0.2??

Edit: nevermind found the download for 8.0.2. Trying now.

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Mikero
Community Manager
Community Manager

Hey folks,

We have a temporary fix for anyone hitting this issue:

Workaround of NAT port forwarding issue in Fusion 8.1 - VMware Fusion Blog - VMware Blogs

We released (fixed) components that you can replace in the Fusion app bundle that will sort this issue out until our next planned release (and it won't mess up your port forward configs).

-
Michael Roy - Product Marketing Engineer: VCF
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nosajis
Contributor
Contributor

Has anyone tried this "fix" yet?

Mikero, any plans to release 8.1.1 with this fix or 8.2 or something? We're a few months later now...

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jcolestock
Contributor
Contributor

I just tried this and seems to be working just fine.

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jcolestock
Contributor
Contributor

Thanks much for this! Looks like it got me working again..

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aertonda
Contributor
Contributor

I fixed it by changing the

# NAT gateway address

IP =...

to the actual IP of my host Mac.

It was pointing to a wrong IP.

After that the "Shared with my Mac" networking of VMs started working again.

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